News:

“Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors; we borrow it from our Children.”Ancient American Indian Proverb Civilitas successit barbarum Ubi Jus - Ibi Remedium ----> Equity sees that as done what ought to be done Equity will not suffer a wrong to be without a remedy - Equity delights in equality - One who seeks equity must do equity - Equity aids the vigilant, not those who slumber on their rights - Equity imputes an intent to fulfill an obligation - Equity acts in personam - Equity abhors a forfeiture - Equity does not require an idle gesture - He who comes into equity must come with clean hands - Equity delights to do justice and not by halves -Equity will not complete an imperfect gift - Equity will not allow a statute to be used as a cloak for fraud

We are 99 % space, and an infinitesimal speck in the universe. Our evolution has reached it's peak, and apparently if "God" designed this, it let us humans destroy most of the life on the planet. There are as many views about what life is about as there are people. If one needs verification of their view by others, then they compromise their own unique view. Just like what happened in the McSteinsen group think. I know you are aware of the Christian religion, and their use of the Bible to tell them about god. here is a list of different denominations, all of which group think, but are in themselves different from the other denominations...

Looks like you ran out of room on your paste at "L". lol.

I think our evolution reached its peak quite some time back and we have been on the downhill slide since the invention of agriculture.

Anyhow, this title is meant to play the Blame Game for the destruction of the earth ecosystem on Homo Saps. Why not make it more specific and blame Boomers? Maybe we should place the blame on White Males? Or on Welfare Queens?

I personally will not take the blame for this, it's not MY fault the earth is going to hell. I was born into 20th Century Amerika. Everybody drove a car. In most of the places I lived, if I didn't have a car, I couldn't get to work. I never learned to farm, I didn't have to. Food came on the shelves of the supermarket. This is somehow MY fault? WTF?

If you want to place blame, place it where it belongs on the Masters of the Universe who run thisS H I T show, the .01%.

How Did We Wind Up in a Post-Truth World? And What Can Be Done About It?

From coal’s astroturfing online to an artificial intelligence’s both-sides equivocation, when we talked about denial in the age of AI last week, things didn’t look promising. Fortunately, the December issue of the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition is here! It’s a special edition, focused on a lengthy article and featuring nine responses, all offering some help navigating misinformation in the post-truth age, with an eye towards technology.

Given the importance of the matter and depth of the research, and that all but the initial paper are behind a paywall, this will be the first in a rare three-part roundup. We felt it fitting to end this post-truth year with a rumination on our post-truth past.

For those who want a crash course in the tenets Lewandowsky, Ecker and Cook’s piece is based on, see The Debunking Handbook. But the three authors move past the summary to a much more interesting analysis: they argue that American society must look at the socio-political context of fake news to fully understand its impacts and solutions, expanding the current focus from online interactions to the full IRL experience.

“The post-truth problem is not a blemish on the mirror,” they write. Instead, “the problem is that the mirror is a window into an alternative reality.” In this reality, elites and their evidence, like the multiple independent lines of research proving climate change is caused by human activities, are cast aside in favor of socially shared alt-news. The election of Donald Trump shows just how these misinformation ecosystems have moved from the fringe corners of the internet into the mainstream.

But the creation of these new realities is not a bipartisan problem: rather, it’s a curiously conservative phenomenon. Whether it’s a NASA-run child slave colony on Mars or the decades-old conspiracy around the UN’s plans for a global government or climate change being a Chinese hoax, the authors advise on the need to consider misinformation through “the lens of political drivers that have created an alternative epistemology that does not conform to conventional standards of evidentiary support.”

This is a fancy way of saying that sometimes conservative leaders just make bullshit up and people believe them. While this reckoning may seem new, the authors demonstrate that it’s been a long time coming (Karl Rove’s admission that the Bush administration actors “create[d] our own reality” is a particularly poignant example). The authors’ reference that Republicans “have moved towards the right in a manner unprecedented since the 1880s” follows with the fact that the right appears to be more susceptible to the pseudo-profound bullshit philosophical nonsensewe’ve talked about before.

One important effect of creating alternate realities on social media, the authors explain, is the invention of intense, imaginary conflict. Did scientists really discuss manipulating data in hacked emails? Of course not, but arguing about it makes for good TV! Fanning the hot flames of these conflicts, in turn, pushes politicians towards extremism. While nominees have traditionally hewed to the center for the largest possible share of votes, modern politicians now focus on their echo chamber to rile up the base. In this new post-truth world, “lying is not only accepted, it is rewarded,” Lewandowsky, Ecker and Cook write. “Falsifying reality is no longer about changing people's beliefs, it is about asserting power.”

These concepts make it crystal clear that climate denial is not an attempt to build a base of knowledge contrary to the consensus. Rather, the authors write, climate denial is “a political operation aimed at generating uncertainty in the public's mind in order to preserve the status quo and to delay climate-change mitigation.”

So how do we get people (conservatives) to care about truth and reality again? Technocognition might just have some answers.

But, uh… what is that? Mind melds with a Mac? Uploading our consciousness into the Matrix? Studying climate change while listening to the latest techno jams? Tune in tomorrow to find out!

Last Tuesday, the Daily Caller ran a story that accidentally admits that the site--and all the others like it--is fake news. The piece’s title alleges that Google’s fact check “Almost Exclusively Targets Conservative Sites.” But of course, as Salon’s Matthew Sheffield points out in his debunking of this attempt to paint Google as partisan, that’s because fake news leans hard to the right. As Sheffield explains, Google fact-checks many right-wing blogs because they’re full of fake news. That doesn’t mean Google’s fact-check is biased--it means it’s accurate.

Why are so many alt-right outlets so full of alt-facts? It might that have something to do with right-wing media being funded by overt partisans like the Kochs and Mercers. But what if those same forces are recognizing that their own echo chamber is only effective for those who have already bought in to their worldview, and that they must expand their influence beyond the bubble? If that were the case, then one would expect to see these funders working with more legitimate, mainstream journalism groups to find new audiences for their agendas.

And that’s exactly what they’re doing. Last Thursday, Christopher Cook of the Columbia Journalism Review wrote a piece on the controversy around the Koch Foundation’s 2017 grant to the American Society of News Editors (ANSE) for its journalist protection hotline and its support for a Poynter Institute project supporting college journalists.

Cook reports that many consider the grants an attempt by the Kochs to whitewash their image. He also focuses on the incredible irony of the Kochs supporting ANSE’s program dedicated to “protecting journalists from attacks” while employing strong-arm tactics against journalists who cover their shady practices. Jane Mayer, who wrote a book last year on the Koch’s weaponized philanthropy, told Cook that after her expose the Kochs so far as to hire “a private eye” whose “firm spent months and months trying to dig up dirt on [Mayer].”

That irony is rich, but Cook misses the Koch’s larger strategy. The Poynter Institute’s program funded by the Koch Foundation works to “provide training to student journalists,” who are given $3,000 “to spend on a reporting project or event that advances civil discourse on campus” in addition to an in-person training session and online courses.

This is the real game. The Kochs are not just using these grants as public relations fodder, as per Mayer and others’ criticisms described in Cook’s piece. What’s more likely is that this is part of Koch’s overarching strategy to just flat out buy the press. With this program, which started on 300 campuses across the country last semester, the Kochs are seeding a generation of reporters who see them as the philanthropists who helped start their career, not the creeps who hire private eyes to dig through a reporter’s garbage.

For a student reporter $3,000 is a lot of money at a very early stage in one’s career. The Kochs are making a bold attempt to buy a lifetime of goodwill for a month’s salary. What’s more, these grants are provided to fund stories that, as a Koch Foundation flack told Cook, explore “civic and economic liberties that allow people to prosper.” This money, then, is specifically earmarked in hopes of starting young reporters on a free-market-friendly career path.

Those who embrace the libertarian framing are likely encouraged to enter the Koch journalism pipeline, where they can intern at a Koch-funded group like Heritage, get trained further by Koch-funded “investigative news” producing Franklin Center, then move into one of the Koch’s own media properties, like Charles Koch Institute partner The Daily Caller.

Once at the Daily Caller, after a few years of Koch-brand fake news training, they’ll be ready to start writing about how fake news-busting fact checks are a big conspiracy.

Renewable EnergyDoesn’t Get More In Subsidies Than Fossil 🦖 & Nuclear Energy Have Gotten, & Continue To Get

January 26th, 2018 by Jake Richardson

SNIPPET:

This article is part of our “CleanTechnica Answer Box” collection. For some reason, there are certain anti-cleantech talking points that get thrown around over and over that are absolute bunk. We got tired of dealing with the same myths repeatedly and also saw others who spent time responding to these untruths in many discussions on CleanTechnica and elsewhere could use some help more efficiently and effectively doing so, so at the suggestion of a reader we created this resource in the same vein as Skeptical Science’s responses to global warming & climate change myths.

Short answer: Fossil fuels and nuclear energy have gotten subsidies for decades. Actually, fossil fuels have received government subsidies for 100 or so years. These days, fossil fuel subsidies reportedly total approximately $5 trillion globally each year. Despite tremendous health costs, climate costs, and countless premature deaths caused by pollution, these super rich and overly mature industries receive subsidies that serve no genuinely useful purpose for society. Renewable energy also receives subsidies, but not to the same degree.

A highly misleading anti-cleantech talking point is that renewable energy “relies on government subsidies,” and that all of the renewable energy growth in recent years is attributable to them. In actuality, fossil fuels and nuclear power have been receiving government support for much longer than renewable energy has. They have received much more government subsidy historically speaking than renewables. And these dirty energy options continue to receive a tremendous amount of government support even though they are overripe industries in many regards.

In the United States alone, the petroleum and coal industries receive at minimum about $20 billion a year in various forms of financial support.

Claiming that renewables receive too much government support while neglecting to mention all of the subsidies fossil fuels get is a deliberate campaign of misinformation.

There have been many government subsidies for the petroleum industry and some have been active for a very long time.

In a document uploaded to the House Committee Ways and Means website, it is explained that a particular financial support, the intangible drilling oil & gas deduction, has been available to the petroleum industry for about 100 years.

Quote

“For all practical purposes, the option to expense or capitalize the intangible drilling expenditures has existed since the first income tax statute. Judicial recognition of the existence of the option for the year 1916 appears in Shaffer v. Comm.”

The US coal industry has also received considerable government support dating to 1932! One analysis came up with a total figure of at least $70 billion, and that was only for the last 60-some years, “Since 1950, the federal government has provided the coal industry with more than $70 billion (in constant 2007 dollars) in tax breaks and subsidies.”

In sum, global fossil fuel subsidies reportedly total approximately $5 trillion per year.

Every time it snows and Al Gore is seen in public, deniers rejoice in pretending that Gore’s climate awareness campaign is somehow incompatible with cold weather. At last week’s elite meet-and-greet in Davos, snow in the Swiss Alps in January provided enough irony for deniers to enjoy, as they gleefully and nonsensically tagged Gore on Twitter and trotted out their favorite photoshops of a frozen Gore.

Deniers haven’t done much to hide their fixation on Gore and their particular love for amateurish photoshops of him frozen in ice. But here’s a surprise: there’s a chance some of these images aren’t hastily slapped together in a dank basement by by trolls who are definitely not going to make it to the South Pole to collect a sandwich left for them by an intrepid 16-year-old.

Rather, they could well be a product of a multi-million dollar lobbying and PR firm.

Last week, Bloomberg Businessweek ran a major feature by Zachary Mider and Ben Elgin on DCI Group, a powerhouse of industry astroturfing. It appears that back in the ‘90s, three former flacks for big tobacco started a PR company which pioneered the concept of “idea laundering,” or making corporate lobbying look like grassroots activism. To stealthily push messaging from its industry clients, DCI Group created projects like Tech Central Station, a blog that was essentially one big ad for DCI clients. They took money from companies like ExxonMobil, and produced so-called “journalism” that mirrored industry talking points. Tech Central is where a lot of the deniers we know and love got some early exposure, including Bjorn Lomborg, Chris Horner, David Legates, Richard Lindzen, Roy Spencer, Steven Milloy, and Willie Soon.

While DCI’s work on climate denial was much less visible once Tech Central shut down, ExxonMobil kept funding the group until at least 2016. (That’s why DCI is one of the groups caught up in the #ExxonKnew cases.)

DCI 🐉 wields extraordinary influence in DC: the Businessweek piece describes one new hire being “awed” at the reach of the firm into the nonprofit, policy, and journalism worlds in DC. This staffer, Mider and Elgin write, “came to see his former colleagues as puppets—and he had become the one with his hand on the strings.”

In the course of checking up on DCI after seeing the Businessweek piece, we found that one of the first big embarrassments for DCI was when the Wall Street Journal exposed that a hacky, very amateur-looking YouTube video mocking Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth was in fact a DCI product. ABC has non-paywalled coverage, co-bylined by Max Culhane and now-CNN anchor Jake Tapper which included a quaint description of YouTube as “mostly amateur videos, which feature lip-synching, odd performances and funny satires.”

Tapper’s story ends with a warning that is all too prescient, and still all-too relevant: “So next time you're reading something on the Internet from a ‘real person’ pushing a movie or defending an actor's alcohol-fueled rant -- be wary. That real person might actually be a hired gun, selling you an idea through deception.”

Rockefeller 🦖 (I'm a Capitalist BUT Competition is a sin! ) is the FATHER of the Fossil Fuel Industry's SECRET MOTTO: Fossil Fuels are CHEAP because the POLITICIANS 🦀 we 🦖 buy GUARANTEE IT! The laws of thermodynamics and pollution effects are for Libral Commies!

Idaho lawmakers are currently debating whether or not to include climate change in science education standards. The local lawmaker opposed to including the fact that human activity is changing the climate, Republican Rep. Scott Syme 🦕, said he doesn’t like that the climate-related sections of the proposed standards “have conclusions drawn in.”

Now, aside from the grammar no-no of ending a sentence with a preposition, this focus on the process of learning instead of the facts is not all that misplaced. Students should absolutely be taught critical thinking skills, instead of just wrote memorization of facts.

But then again, Rep. Syme said he doesn’t “care if the students come up with a conclusion that the earth is flat – as long as it’s their conclusion, not something that’s told to them.”

Which is, well, exactly the opposite of how education is supposed to work. Of course teaching critical thinking skills must allow a child to examine sources for bias, compare empirical evidence and draw a conclusion based on his studies. But if that conclusion is one that is clearly and plainly wrong, then the education system has failed.

To profess that you don’t care what a kid thinks, as long as she came up with it herself, is to embrace exactly the sort of “feelings over facts” that conservative trolls lambast.

Syme’s🐉 too-clever-by-half approach to climate denial of hiding behind the idea that kids should be given the skills to think for themselves reveals that he really doesn’t care at all about whether Idaho’s students get a quality education.

If lawmakers like Syme don’t care if students decide to believe something incorrect, like that the earth is flat or climate change isn’t happening, it’s clear they don’t care about education. Hiding behind the idea that teaching kids to think better is a coward’s way of avoiding responsibility to ensure Idaho’s children receive an education that prepares them for the real world.

But perhaps that’s their strategy. The lawmakers opposed to the new science standards are all Republicans. And as we explored at the end of last year, the GOP is losing control of truth in its own party, as studies show conservatives are increasingly creating and living in an alternate reality where facts are secondary to ideology. Passing that on to the next generation is a way to try and combat the reality that the younger demographics are all leaning far to the left of their parents.

If they all receive an education of the sort Rep. Syme wants though, that may change, since they’ll be comforted by platitudes instead of facing reality. They’ll be climate science deniers because no one taught them real science, but left them to fend for themselves on a flat Earth.

After examining more than 40 common climate change myths pushed by those who are hell-bent on discrediting scientific conclusions about the global crisis, three researchers teamed up to create a six-step critical thinking tool that helps people combat misinformation by "neutralizing" the lies.

The Fossil Fuelers 🦖 DID THE Clean Energy Inventions suppressing, Climate Trashing, human health depleting CRIME, but since they have ALWAYS BEEN liars and conscience free crooks 🦀, they are trying to AVOID DOING THE TIME or PAYING THE FINE! Don't let them get away with it! Pass it on!

"We know that humans have most flourished during times of what? Warming trends," Pruitt told Nevada news station News 3. "So I think there's assumptions made that because the climate is warming that that necessarily is a bad thing."

Ironically, Pruitt's remarks were made after News 3 host Gerard Ramalho listed a slew of very real and very dangerous climate-related consequences to the EPA administrator—southern Nevada has felt one of its hottest summers and warmest winters ever, the polar ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, and hurricanes and tornadoes are intensifying.

Pruitt's gaffe is comparable to the time he said carbon dioxide is "not a primary contributor" to climate change. But it is. It just is, as the overwhelming majority of climate scientists have concluded.

"As the evidence becomes ever more compelling that climate change is real and human-caused, the forces of denial turn to other specious arguments, like 'it will be good for us,'" Penn State University climate scientist Michael Mann told the Guardian, which first flagged the interview.

"There is no consistency at all to their various arguments other than that we should continue to burn fossil fuels ," Mann added.

Pruitt, as well as his oval office boss, continue to ignore scientific fact as they roll back one environmental protection after another—including the Obama-era Clean Power Plan that slashes emissions from coal-power plants—to push for fossil fuels.🦖

Good Life Within Planetary Boundaries StudyMisrepresented as Wealth Redistribution

A story this week in the conservative National Review claims that, based on a new study in Nature Sustainability, environmentalists want “to make the rich West much poorer so that the destitute can become richer.” Climate Depot gave the study the headline banner treatment and reposted it; given the Depot’s wide reach in Denierdom, we can probably expect to see more of this attack. The study fits perfectly with a common denier narrative that climate action is just a communist hoax to redistribute wealth from rich countries to poor, so it’s not surprising that deniers would want to shout it from the rooftops

But there are two big problems with this story. One, no one, environmentalist or otherwise, is trumpeting this study as justification for wealth redistribution. And two, the study says absolutely nothing about wealth redistribution.

What the study actually does is quantify resource use required for basic and improved standards of living, and compare this use with the constraints of our natural resources . The authors examined the use of several resources worldwide, including clean water, nitrogen and phosphorus for agriculture. They also included carbon emissions, and how much pollution the atmosphere can accommodate. They conclude that in order to raise quality of life around the world, we need to find more efficient ways to use our available resources.

Beyond technological advancements to increase how much we can physically extract from the earth, the most practical path would be economic reforms: by moving from the current standard of constant growth to meet needs to a system with sustainable lifestyles that don’t require constant consumption, the authors argue, everyone can live the good life without using up all our natural resources.

This question of how much of our natural capital we can spend on improving lives without breaking the bank gets twisted by the National Review’s 🦖 Wesley Smith . In Smith’s piece, he repeatedly excerpts from the study, then disingenuously jumps to paranoid and hyperbolic conclusions. Smith writes the authors “prescribe an international technocratic tyranny;” also according to Smith, the way to a sustainable future where we aren’t consuming more than the Earth has to offer would mean “confiscation of wealth” and that we must “destroy the evil fossil fuel companies and redistribute, redistribute, redistribute!”

This hand-wringing is quite a leap, considering that the word “redistribute” appears exactly zero times in the study. There’s also the little fact that the study’s lead author Daniel O’Neill ✨ told the LA Times that even if we could magically reallocate all the world’s resources, living the good life would mean “"we need to become two to six times more efficient” in how we use our resources to better human lives. The point of the study, then, is that even if we were to “redistribute, redistribute, redistribute,” we STILL would need to change things to avoid using up all of Earth’s materials that make modern life possible.

This study is all about how to raise the standard of living for those in poverty while simultaneously ensuring currently-wealthy countries don’t have to totally sacrifice our standard of living. Unfortunately, this major point seems to have eluded Smith 🦀. “The goal [of the study] clearly is a technocracy,” he writes in a panic, “that will undermine freedom, constrain opportunity, not truly benefit the poor, and materially harm societies that have moved beyond the struggle for survival.”

National Review titles Smith’s piece “Environmentalists Push Global Wealth Redistribution.” But the study hasn’t been pushed by any environmentalists, says nothing of redistribution, and focuses on our natural resources, not wealth.

Message to Smith : Amazing. Every single word you just said...is wrong.

֍ If a person is lying, they’ll commit a deceptive behavior within five seconds of being questioned, and commit two or more deceptive behaviors before they’re done responding

֍ Ignore a person’s truthful statements, which are often attempts at manipulation, and instead focus on their deceptions

֍ Deceptive behaviors include failing to deny the accusation, failing to answer the question and using “convincing statements” rather than conveying information

֍ Nonverbal cues that a person is lying include grooming gestures, hand-to-face motions, moving feet and clearing of the throat

By Dr. Mercola

A person lies an average of 10 times a day, according to Susan Carnicero — and she’s one to know. As a former CIA officer who spent more than 20 years interrogating, interviewing and polygraphing suspects, she’s learned a thing or two about how to spot a liar.

In fact, Carnicero has also developed behavioral screening programs used by the U.S. government and co-written the book “Spy the Lie,” which teaches you how to detect deception. She’s also a co-founder of QVerity, which is a provider of behavioral analysis and screening services for both the private and public sectors.

It may seem shocking that people lie on such a regular basis, but remember that not all lies are malicious. Little white lies are told more often than big important lies, according to research published in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology,1 and this includes innocent mentions like saying you’re fine when someone asks you how you’re doing — even if you’re actually not.

There’s a wide range of lies, Carnicero notes in the video above. At one end of the spectrum are lies meant to spare somebody’s feelings or keep a conversation from going in a direction you don’t want it to go. At the other end are big bold-faced “I didn’t do it” lies. It’s in the latter case where being able to spot a liar can definitely work in your favor, in more scenarios than you might initially imagine. For instance, if you’re hiring a new employee or thinking about investing in a financial venture, knowing the truth is certainly important.

Likewise, in your personal life, whether you’re confronting your partner about potential infidelity, your child about drug use or wondering whether your new flame is trustworthy. Even when you’re in the market for a new car or seeking a contractor for your home, cuing in on telltale signs of deceit can help you avoid an expensive mistake.

How to Spot a Lie: Analyze Versus Speculate

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to tell if a person is lying just by looking at them. This would be speculation. Instead, Carnicero stresses the importance of analyzing the situation. “What I want to look at is how a person is reacting to things,” she says, using the example of someone sitting with their arms folded — a “global behavior.” While this might at first appear to be a closed-off or deceptive posture, there are many reasons why someone might sit in this way, from being cold to just being a habit.

“We give way too much weight to global behaviors,” Carnicero says. “We want to do away with that. That’s speculation.” To pick out what’s relevant and what’s not, first identify the stimulus — the questions you’re asking — and then focus on the behaviors that are directly associated with the person’s response. Timing is key here; a major red flag is a deceptive behavior that occurs within the first five seconds after the question is asked.

“If they don’t show me a deceptive behavior within five seconds, they’re not lying to me,” she says, adding that paying attention to clusters is another key. “I want to see at least two or more behaviors [during their response] for that to be a deceptive answer.” In some cases, the first deceptive behavior may occur before you’ve even finished asking the question — and this is a red flag too — but just remember that the first one should occur within the first five seconds — and there should be two or more in total to signal a lie.

Managing Your Bias and Recognizing Evasiveness

Many people are taught that lying is wrong and to try to look for the good in people. But when trying to spot a liar, it’s important to ignore truthful behavior, which will only add to your bias and contribute to what Carnicero describes as the “halo effect.” “Deceptive people can give us truthful answers,” she says, and will try to manipulate you to believe them. In many cases, they may give you more information than you asked for in an attempt to make you think they’re a good person. According to Carnicero:

“The people that we know are already out to manage our perceptions … go way beyond what we’re asking for … the purpose of that again is to convince us that they’re good people, and what happens if I’m a novice is that I start to think that’s a good person. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy … and I’m going to start to think that that person’s good, and I’m going to miss the bad.”

So make a point to ignore truthful behavior, instead focusing on deceptive ones.Meanwhile, recognize tactics of evasiveness, which are major clues that a person is not being candid, such as:

Failure to provide information asked for — does the person go on at length but not answer the question you asked?

Failure to deny. “The most important thing to the honest person is giving you that answer, denying if they didn’t do something. The truth is their biggest ally,” Carnicero says.

Use of exclusionary qualifiers, such as saying “for the most part,” “fundamentally” or “not really.” These beg for a follow-up question to reveal what the person is leaving out.

Aggression Is Often a Sign of Lying, as Are ‘Convincing’ Statements

When evaluating a person’s trustworthiness, “some behaviors weigh more than others,” according to Carnicero. “Aggression is one of those.” If you question your child whether he’s taking drugs and his immediate response is one of anger, it’s a major red flag. Likewise, if you’ve had a theft at your company, and the employee you’re questioning attacks you for asking about the theft.

“If you have somebody who jumps down your throat because you ask them a question — I don’t even care if it’s your kid … you got a problem,” she says. They may also attack a third party, such as the company itself for not providing enough security to prevent thefts in the first place. Along these lines, demonstrating an inappropriate level of concern is another telltale sign that someone is not telling the truth.

For example, if they brush off an important question as inconsequential, smile at an inappropriate time or get angry for seemingly no reason, they’re likely lying. Carnicero also stresses the importance of differentiating between convincing statements and those intended to convey information — the former being a sign of lying. Let’s say you ask someone if they stole something.

If the person launches into a long response about their good employment history and trustworthiness, those are convincing statements that, while they sound true, signal a lie. Simply saying “no” is conveying information that is likely a truthful response. Carnicero says, “A convincing statement is the strongest arrow that any person is going to have in their quiver. Saying ‘I’m a good person,’ ‘I’m a good worker’ … when somebody’s trying to convince you of something” rather than convey information, it’s a strong sign of a lie.

Paying attention to small details can also reveal a lie — like saying “I wouldn’t do that” versus “I didn’t do that.” The former — “wouldn’t” — is often a lie. “We have to listen for didn’t,” Carnicero says. Invoking religion is another tactic liars often use to draw you in and manage your perceptions of them, saying things like “I swear on a stack of bibles.” Other subtle signs include “perception qualifiers” such as “honestly,” “to tell you the truth” and “quite frankly,” which are used to verbally “dress up a lie.” When combined with clusters of other deceptive behaviors, these can help you to spot a lie.

Nonverbal Signs of Deceit

A person’s nonverbal cues are also important to hone in on when evaluating whether or not they’re lying. Carnicero recommends paying attention to the following nonverbal cues:2

• Behavioral pause: If you ask a person a vague question, such as what were you doing on this date years ago, it’s reasonable to expect a pause before they respond. But if you ask, did you rob a bank 10 years ago to this day, they should respond immediately. In the latter case, a delay is a sign of lying.

• Verbal/nonverbal disconnect: If a person nods their head while saying no, or shakes their head “no” while saying yes, this disconnect is considered a deceptive behavior (except in certain cultures in which nodding doesn’t mean yes).

• Anchor point movements: Another sign of a lie is movement in an “anchor point,” such as feet on the floor, arms on a desk or even a dangling foot if a person’s legs are crossed.

• Grooming gestures: Straightening a tie or other piece of clothing, fixing hair, adjusting glasses or fiddling with shirt cuffs can be subconscious ways that people try to quell their anxiety and are often a sign of a lie. Clearing of the throat or swallowing prior to answering are also considered indicators of deceptiveness.

• Hand-to-face movements: If a person put their hand to their mouth, licks their lips, pulls on their ear or otherwise touches their face or head, it’s another deceptive behavior. Parade noted:3

“The reason goes back to simple high school science. You’ve asked a question, and the question creates a spike in anxiety because a truthful response would be incriminating.

That, in turn, triggers the autonomic nervous system to go to work to dissipate the anxiety, draining blood from the surfaces of the face, the ears, and the extremities — which can create a sensation of cold or itchiness. Without the person even realizing it, his hands are drawn to those areas, or there’s a wringing or rubbing of the hands.”

Spotting a Liar Isn’t an Exact Science

While it isn’t always easy to determine when you’re being lied to, following Carnicero’s guidelines can certainly help. You can find more details, including many anecdotes that show the guidelines in action, in Carnicero’s book “Spy the Lie: Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Detect Deception.” Being able to decipher the truth can be life changing when it comes to your professional and personal life, and you can even use it to save yourself money and avoid getting ripped off.

As for lying, if you’re on the giving rather than the receiving end, it’s worth noting that adopting an “honesty is the best policy” approach isn’t only good for those around you but also for yourself. 🕊People who told only the truth for five weeks had an average of seven fewer symptoms, such as sore throats, headaches, nausea and mental tension, than the control group,4 with researchers suggesting that lying may cause stress that dampens the immune system.*

In the case of lying, however, many people do it without even thinking about it, which means, in order to protect your health — and your reputation — you’ve got to recognize that you’re doing it — and change it — before those around you recognize it first.

* Agelbert NOTE:Psychopaths🦖 like Trump🦀 do NOT suffer immune system problems from serial mendacity; they actually benefit physically from this despicable behavior. The reason for this is that their brains have been "rewired" to equate pleasure with some type of perceived denigration, mockery (e.g. lying to make a fool of somebody trying to expose your crimes) or abuse, be it verbal or physical, of humans and/or animals around them. They🦀 also, deliberately and methodically, convincingly lie to gain a person's confidence and trust in order to subsequently scam said person later on. During this mens rea activity, the psychopath is every bit as charming and affable as he or she is cruel and denigrating when the victim (i.e. the mark or the target of the con) has been scammed and complains about the scam.

Pruitt doing his bought and paid for Fossil Fuel Industry thing.The fossil fuel🦖TOOLPruitt🦀, now busy trashing the EPA, is even more skilled at clever, disingenuous, innocent sounding mendacity than Trump is.

Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute 🦖 wrote an essay for Foreign Affairs published last week, headlined “The Two-Degree Delusion; The Dangers of an Unrealistic Climate Change Target.”

While Nordhaus and Breakthrough are not your typical climate science deniers, deniers often appreciate them. Both Nordhaus and his parent institute have long been described as hippie-punchers for their consistent attacks on the left as a way to position themselves as Very Serious Centrist Thinkers. For example, Nordhaus and colleagues wrote in Foreign Affairs last January that “the trajectory of emissions is unlikely to differ significantly under a Trump administration from what it would have been under a Hillary Clinton administration.” That kind of laughable both-siderism is par for Breakthrough’s course.

With that in mind, reading Nordhaus’s latest essay on the 2C target provides a lesson in applying the critical thinking and argument analysis skills we discussed last week.

The premise of the Foreign Affairs piece is threefold. Nordhaus’s first point is that adaptation and mitigation are either-or options. Secondly, he argues that developing countries will be more resilient as they grow more wealthy--wealth only achievable by fossil fuels, as renewables, he claims, can’t exceed 20% of a grid’s capacity. From there, Nordhaus concludes that meeting 2C would mean sacrificing developing nation’s ability to adapt to changes.

Take a moment to read those points again. Can you spot the disconnects between premise, reality, and conclusion?

That’s right! Adaptation and mitigation aren’t either-or decisions. Countries can reduce emissions while also fortifying infrastructure! (Particularly if there were some sort of policy to put a price on carbon emissions, and use that revenue to improve resilience…)

And of course, renewables are perfectly capable of replacing fossil fuels as developing countries electrify.

Nordhaus’s claim that renewablescan’t provide more than a fifth of a grid’s poweris disproven by several existing examples. Mexico is already at 21 percent, and aiming higher. Chile has doubled Nordhaus’s imagined limit, with 45 percent of its electricity coming from clean sources. Costa Rica ran for 300 days on 100% renewables last year. Denmark, the UK, Germany and Portugal have all briefly run entirely on renewables, albeit for short periods of time.

There’s a lot more you could say, but we’ll leave it up to you to find the fallacy in essentially every paragraph of the piece that accuses the climate community of being delusional.

Because as the clean energy experiences of Mexico, Chile and others show, it’s Ted who appears delusional for thinking a high renewable threshold is impossible. We’ll just caution that people who live in glass Nordhauses shouldn’t throw stones.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA’s) most recent Annual Energy Outlook (AEO) should give anyone watching today’s energy markets a jolt of surprise. Not for projecting that U.S. energy demand will grow by an average of 0.4 percent per year after two decades of evidence to the contrary. Not for presenting major alternative scenarios only in the cases of cost and technology improvements in the oil and gas industries. But for exhibiting erroneous data about the costs of renewables, and for its simple and outdated outlook on how the market is changing and will in time transform.

The danger is that key decision makers will make decisions in accordance with an altogether different future than might otherwise result from current market activity. This risk stems from the agency’s opaque assumptions and modeling methodology, which have recently been the subject of significant criticism. In response, the EIA has sought to create a tenuous distinction between its “projections” and “forecasts” that requires mental acrobatics to accept—as do the annual outputs of its work.

Are We Looking at the Same Market?

In a two-part tragedy, incorrect initial positions go on to influence completely outdated expectations about the composition of the American energy landscape through 2050. To its credit, EIA analysts read the news (if selectively): the AEO projects that renewables will be among the fastest-growing segments in electricity generation markets. But the EIA assessment of generation costs across technology types in 2022 more closely resembles a copy-paste of renewables’ market data from back in 2015. It’s no wonder the EIA expects that policy will be the near-exclusive driver of renewables’ market growth, by way of state-enforced procurement requirements and federal tax credits.

EIA methodology is a key reason why the AEO’s citation of levelized costs (those upfront costs spread over an energy asset’s lifetime generation) seems so obsolete. Suffice to say that the EIA ignores the average results of recent tenders in the U.S. and elsewhere when compiling its forward-looking average price estimates. As a result, stagnating future prices—wind and solar are estimated to decline by only $3/MWh from 2019–2022, unsubsidized—underlie EIA’s projection that capacity installations over the same period will be only 60 percent of actual annual totals for the last two to three years.

In contrast, indicators over the past 18 months are regularly showing that large- and medium-scale solar and large-scale wind prices are far more competitive than marginal costs from traditional sources—especially when they are sited near to load, as most often only modular renewables can be. This, in turn, is enabling still-expensive storage to be coupled with renewables generation to firm supply for portions of the day and provide grid services in addition to those offered by renewables with smart inverters. Collectively, these trends indicate the rapid approach of widespread grid parity between traditional sources and less-intermittent clean energy generation.

International Markets Drive This Momentum

The EIA should look to real, current market dynamics to inform its initial positions. To start, the market is now global. Following leadership in early market development efforts by Europe and the U.S., countries like China, India, and Mexico have set their sights on securing sustainable economic development and near-term, cutting-edge jobs for their constituents. This motivates large-scale procurement of renewable energy that their domestic companies are simultaneously racing to manufacture and distribute, often with a boost in expertise and capital from established companies in developed markets.

Second, international markets are scaling—fast. As each large-scale procurement sees low bids from not one or two, but ten bidders, governments, companies, and communities are encouraged to go back to the market with more and larger tenders—even going so far as to free up capacity by canceling previously planned coal plants. Large, competitive procurements in LEDs, renewables, and now even electric vehicles ensure that buyers can leverage market forces and use existing expertise to innovate technology and delivery models that achieve step changes down the learning curve to reduce cost. Even though tenders may occasionally risk overestimating future cost declines, these are marginal in relation to their empowerment of cost reduction trends that are consistently more rapid than analysts expect.

Third, technology markets are converging to drive nonlinear deployment. Manufacturers of lithium-ion storage, for example, are serving multiple segments like electric vehicles and grid-scale storage; thus growth in any one segment will enable cost declines that support growth in others. Further, storage will support intermittent but predictable renewables generation, unlocking new customers’ interest and further deployment. As evidence of this trend, leading project developers in the U.S.—some of which are subsidiaries of traditional utilities hedging their bets—have merged traditionally separate teams to analyze, bid, and build integrated and technology-agnostic portfolios of cost-effective generation resources.

Together, market dynamics like these, missed by the EIA, tell us that the proverbial cat is out of the bag, and its claws inexorably stretch back into U.S. markets. In Colorado, Xcel’s all-source solicitation in late 2017 demonstrated just this, with one of the largest energy companies in the U.S. submitting a solar plus storage bid for $36/MWh based on the cost of components mostly built abroad. Attempts to wrestle it back in risk ceding the U.S. businesses’ cutting-edge innovation to foreign businesses in a global market estimated at $1 trillion per year by some of the world’s largest companies.

Reality

The EIA needs to start looking at current market offers and consistent patterns in actual deployment versus its historical forecasts. Only in this way will it start to come to grips with the real trends in the accelerating energy transition, and have the insight to be able to project or forecast the revolution that is coming. If not, it risks becoming totally irrelevant as a source of information and a poor guidance for business leaders and policy makers across the country.